THE OMEGA REACH v1.0.0
Greetings curators!
I’m excited to share my submission for the fifth-annual Games for Blind Gamers 5 jam: THE OMEGA REACH.
Is it a museum simulator? a universe generator? a virtual instrument? an elaborate tech demo? or my biggest WTF did I just play
yet?
Culminating nearly 200 hours of development, you’ll need to discover for yourself the absolute absurdity of this release.
Perhaps its biggest achievement for me is its control scheme. Since the release of Project Ephemera, I’ve been ruminating over its minigame, Secret Bread, and how to turn that wonky randomly-generated instrument into a full experience. So a game where you navigate the universe through touch to collect, identify, and play instruments was the most fitting concept! I am especially pleased with how it maps its three-dimensional rooms onto the keyboard, allowing you to hear their walls and exits by dragging your hand across it. There is so much more untapped potential for this mechanic, of which I could only unlock a fraction over the past month. If it’s your only takeaway, my hope is that you see and appreciate that breakthrough too.
There are many topics to explore about its creation, like the finer details of the controls, the challenges with implementing my most robust tutorial yet, or how I built the entire dungeon crawling sequence in the cellar within the last 48 hours of the jam. Unfortunately, a common theme across my recent updates has been my mental health, and I am extremely exhausted after this marathon. However, I did keep somewhat of an informal log during development, which I would like to compile and expand at a later date. For now, the purpose of this post is to simply let you know that this exists.
In the meantime, please join me in playing, rating, and reviewing all of the other 32 submissions to the jam. I am especially grateful for Eric and Patricia, who have been excellent co-hosts and performed the vast majority of the organizing this year. On the other side of the jam, I need to address a few projects with important hotfixes, and I’m excited to finally finish writing the last bits of Periphery Synthetic.
Thanks for playing!